In a series of critical letters sent to the leaders of several NATO allies, including Norway, Germany, Belgium and Canada, the U.S. president Donald Trump warned them either to spend more on their own defense or the U.S. will shift its military presence in Europe. The letters was the latest sign of Trump’s resentment from European allies in NATO as he has repeatedly claimed that its members are taking advantage of the United States. It was at the 2014 summit in Wales that NATO members committed to spend 2% of their gross domestic product on national defense, now and then Trump has complained that NATO allies have not fulfilled this commitment. In the letters, Trump has mentioned that the U.S. patience, after more than one year of public and private complaints about allies not having done enough to share the burden of collective defense, is over now and might think of a response, something like to adjust the United States’ military presence around the world. Trump has long griped about the NATO members’ lack of burden-sharing, but this time he has stepped much more further and claimed that some of the United States’ closest allies have failed to pay debts to the NATO.

In his letter to Ms. Merkel, for example, Trump wrote : “It will, however, become increasingly difficult to justify to American citizens why some countries do not share NATO’s collective security burden while American soldiers continue to sacrifice their lives overseas or come home gravely wounded,”

Former Defense Department official, Derek Chollet, who is the executive vice president for security and defense policy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States said: ” Trump still seems to think that NATO is like a club that you owe dues to, or some sort of protection racket where the U.S. is doing all the work protecting all these deadbeat Europeans while they’re sitting around on vacation, and now he is suggesting there are consequences. “Europeans have been watching Donald Trump begin to implement his rhetoric on trade in ways that are very combative,” he added, “and they’re starting to contemplate whether he would do this regarding security issues, as well.”

But it is not just Trump who sent letters, last month Jim Mattis, the U.S. secretary of defense, wrote to Gavin Williamson, the British defense minister that he was “concerned” about the United Kingdom’s military strength being “at risk of erosion” if it did not increase spending, and warned that France could eclipse Britain as the United States’ “partner of choice” if Britain did not increase the investment. Of the 28 country members, excluding the United States, fifteen now have a strategy to meet a NATO benchmark first agreed in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region. But Spain has said it will not meet the 2024 target. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Portugal, Norway and Denmark are also lagging. Hungary expects to meet the goal only by 2026. France will increase its defense spending by more than a third between 2017 and 2025, but Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, is not expected to reach the 2 percent target by 2024. NATO data shows that Britain, Greece, Romania and the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania meet, or are close to, the 2 percent goal. France and Turkey are among those countries set to reach it soon. However Trump says that NATO allies spending plans are still falling short.

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